Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  Hitherto science has given no hint of the possibility of exploring the vast and mysterious beyond, from which no visible ray of light has ever been detected, or is ever likely to be detected, by the most far-reaching and sensitive of optic aids. But now there comes a promise of an extension of positive knowledge to fields of space so remote that light is tired out and lost before it can traverse the intervening distance. . . . If at any point in such blank space the tasimeter indicates an accession of temperature, and does this invariably, the legitimate inference will be that the instrument is in range with a stellar body, either non-luminous or so distant as to be beyond the reach of vision assisted by the telescope. . . . Possibly too it may bring within human ken a vast multitude of nearer bodies—burnt out suns or feebly reflecting planets—now unknown because not luminous.18

  Fast-forward to the USA during the Cold War. Ballistic missiles are installed far and wide. Broad sky surveys have already been done, but nothing big at infrared wavelengths. In 1963 the Air Force creates an Infrared Physics Branch within its research laboratories, and the Infrared Celestial Backgrounds program begins.

  Not every researcher turned directly to the Air Force for funding. In 1965, for instance, two enterprising astrophysicists at Caltech embarked on an infrared sky survey tuned to a wavelength of 2.2 millionths of a meter. That’s 2.2 microns in astrophysical parlance, where one micron equals about one-twentieth the width of a human hair. At this band, Earth’s atmosphere happens to be 80 percent transparent. Some war-surplus hardware, a ground-based telescope, a homemade five-foot reflector, and NASA funding enabled the investigators to produce a catalogue of the brightest 5,600 objects in the Northern Hemisphere skies, many of them never seen by visible-light telescopes and a number of them stunningly gigantic and distant. Under the title Two-Micron Sky Survey, NASA published their work in 1969.19

  The next major infrared survey, the AFCRL Infrared Sky Survey, did have the Air Force’s imprimatur. This was a true military–astrophysical collaboration, conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the auspices of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts and sponsored in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. This time the telescope was built by Hughes Aircraft. The survey itself, implemented via rockets prepared and launched by the US Naval Ordnance Missile Test Facility at White Sands, observed the sky through three longer-wavelength bands than in the prior survey—four, eleven, and twenty microns—and resulted in a catalogue of 3,200 objects covering almost 90 percent of the sky. Therein lies just one of the many advantages of an orbiting telescope: it can access the entire sky, both Northern and Southern Hemispheres. A notable feature of both this survey and its predecessor is that the published report was not classified, so all scientists, no matter what they may have been investigating, would have open access to the data.20 The same held true for a comprehensive follow-up study, published in 2003: the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), covering 99.998 percent of the sky and providing IR brightness and coordinate data on 471 million objects.21

  Stephan Price, co-author of the AFCRL Infrared Sky Survey, writes that for most of his half-century career in infrared astronomy he was supported by the Air Force, primarily through the AFCRL—and was glad of it, because he not only found himself in a position to do “ ‘cutting-edge’ research that was personally highly rewarding” but also found “the related practical Air Force space surveillance problems both interesting and challenging.” His detailed history of the close postwar partnership between astrophysics and the military brims with references to corporations, universities, branches of the Department of Defense, distinguished investigators, significant discoveries, and the intricate braid of military needs and astrophysical quests. Price also chronicles the continual bureaucratic reshuffling and renaming within military research structures, as well as the effects of the Mansfield Amendment to the FY1970 Military Procurement Authorization Act, which mandated that the Department of Defense could not use its funds “to carry out any research project or study unless such project or study has a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function.” Passed in late 1969 during the Vietnam War “in the context of the general public disenchantment with both science and the military at the time,” the amendment, intended to trigger increased scrutiny, briefly led to reductions in personnel and reorganization of responsibilities.22 The FY1971 authorization act turned the amendment’s intentions upside down. Now funding decisions would be based on “the opinion of the Secretary of Defense.” The secretary, a member of the president’s cabinet, would be free to opine on whether projects had a “potential relationship to a military function or operation.” The words “direct,” “apparent,” and “specific” were gone from the legislation.23

  Whatever the true effects of the Mansfield Amendment, Price’s account shows the enduring strength and breadth of military support for both basic space science and utilitarian space science. Few projects could be of greater direct use to both the military and the astrophysicists than an infrared sky map, though of course military support flowed to other infrared projects as well, both before, during, and after the amendment.

  Martin Harwit, former director of the National Air and Space Museum and an IR astronomer himself, writes that the development of infrared detectors—the instruments without which IR astronomy could not exist—“was largely guided not by astronomers, but by military needs, such as ‘night vision’ enabling warm objects to be discerned in the dark.”24 Science historian Ronald E. Doel agrees, referring specifically to US research on planetary atmosphere, the region on Earth through which every ballistic missile must pass:

  [T]hese programs introduced astronomers to military agencies eager to fund astronomical research. . . . [M]ilitary patronage helped maintain the viability of American observatories in the lean years of 1946 and 1947. However, military contract funding also encouraged researchers to design proposals with short-term solutions. Those projects that did not achieve these promised ends faced heightened risk of disruption or discontinuance, regardless of their scientific merit; this bound researchers more closely with military missions as the cold war deepened.25

  But it was the all-sky survey that provided data on the largest possible scale. The infrared sky map characterized the enduring cosmic backdrop against which a real-time incoming threat, whether a ballistic missile or an asteroid, must be distinguished. In war or in peace, this intelligence was, and remains, vital to national security.

  In fact, sky surveys have yielded military value not merely because of their infrared info. Take the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an unprecedentedly ambitious wide-area survey designed to gather ultraviolet, visible light, and infrared brightness readings for hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies, and spectra for millions more. To achieve its ends, SDSS uses a single-purpose telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and a unique calibrated-measurement system and data pipeline invented just for these observations. Begun in the 1990s (and, as of 2018, deep into its fourth survey) and funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this gargantuan undertaking by hundreds of investigators and dozens of institutions around the world has outstripped all previous ground-based sky surveys in accuracy, scale, and value to astrophysicists.

  From its inception, SDSS’s central tasks were daunting: the management and analysis of the prodigious quantities of raw data obtained by the telescope. Innovative software to the rescue. So clever, efficient, and effective were the algorithms to turn the light of cosmic objects into analyzable data that SDSS research papers on the analytics of astrophysical data streams appeared not in astrophysics circles but at the 2012 International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis and the 2014 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference. The US Department of Defense ultimately took note and, in a reversal of the more usual direction of requests for assistance, asked one of the sky survey’s project leaders, Alexander S. Szalay—Johns Hopkins pr
ofessor of astronomy and computer science as well as director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science—to brief a key branch of the Pentagon on how SDSS processed and analyzed stupendous data flows obtained from images and spectra.26 An instance of astrophysical inventiveness, spurred by the quest for more comprehensive knowledge of the universe and subsequently enlisted in the service of national security.

  IV.

  The high-energy profile of X-rays, like gamma rays, demands a telescope of very different concept and design from the ones that focus and detect visible light. X-rays are among the several bands of light that do not reach Earth’s surface. Our atmospheric layer of ozone simply and completely absorbs them. In the absence of observing platforms above Earth’s atmosphere, X-ray phenomena in the universe go unnoticed.

  Enter the Italian-born American astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi. Beginning in the late 1950s, he applied himself to the task of perfecting such a telescope. “Until the space age came about and we could put instruments on satellites and rockets,” he said later in life, “we couldn’t find out what was out there. So by looking in X-rays, you are seeing aspects of nature which we did not even suspect existed but which are very important in the formation, evolution, and dynamics of the structures in the universe.”27 Giacconi is credited, in fact, with fathering the field of cosmic X-ray astronomy.

  In 1959, as a young scientist, Giacconi joined American Science and Engineering (AS&E), a company formed the previous year by a group of investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In its early days, the company specialized in making scientific instruments for NASA. But while Giacconi and his team did space science—for example, photographing the Sun in X-rays and discovering the first stellar X-ray source28—AS&E began to branch out into medical and security technology. Today, the home page of the company’s website highlights its assistance to military and law-enforcement personnel who face challenges at borders, at ports, and in conflict zones. AS&E systems facilitate such procedures as cargo screening, threat detection for military personnel, bomb detection, and drug interdiction. Security is the emphasis. X-rays are the enabler.

  The hijacking of commercial airplanes, often American, presented an especially high-profile security challenge during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cuba, which was subject to a Kennedy-era Cold War trade embargo rendering it off-limits to airline traffic from the United States, was a frequent destination for political dissidents until early 1969, when congressional hearings revealed that, after arriving in Cuba, hijackers were subjected to lengthy interrogation followed by hard labor. Soon the aims of air pirates expanded to include extortion of ransom money, political blackmail, and terrorist revenge. Worldwide in 1969 alone, there were eighty-six hijackings, an average of more than one every four days. American carriers were the most common target.29

  Clearly the aviation industry needed to screen passengers and their luggage for weapons and explosive devices. AS&E, which had already developed X-ray telescopes for NASA and a parcel X-ray system for the US Postal Service,30 was able to provide a machine to do precisely that. By late 1972, passenger screening stations had been set up in most US airports. Hijackings plummeted. In early 1973 a Nevada senator introduced legislation to require that, before boarding an aircraft, “all passengers and all property intended to be carried in the aircraft cabin in air transportation be screened by weapon-detecting procedures or facilities before boarding.” It became law in 1974.31 Thenceforth all carry-ons would be scanned at all airports. AS&E scanners were everywhere.

  During this period and continuing for several decades, Giacconi would be the principal investigator on four NASA X-ray telescopes, starting with the first one ever, Uhuru, launched in 1970, and continuing through the flagship observatory Chandra, launched in 1999. For pioneering the discovery of highly energetic phenomena in the universe, including black holes dining on stars that have orbited too close, and indeed for birthing an entire subfield of astrophysics, he would share the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics and receive the 2003 President’s National Medal of Science.

  At that time, I was serving on the twelve-member National Science Foundation committee tasked with recommending the National Medal of Science recipients to the president. The awards ceremony, to which the committee is of course invited, is held annually at the White House; the ceremony for the 2003 winners took place in March 2005. That’s when I met Riccardo for the first time, as we passed together through the visitors’ foyer, a semi-detached security area adjoining the East Wing of the White House. Queuing to be scanned, screened, and scrutinized, we placed our belongings on the conveyor belt of an X-ray machine. Its maker? American Science and Engineering: AS&E.

  V.

  If you like the universe at all, you’ve probably seen many of the Hubble Space Telescope’s gorgeous images of galaxies and nebulae. What you might not have come across is the fact that Hubble is basically a photoreconnaissance satellite whose cameras point upward at the heavens rather than downward at Earth.

  During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Eric J. Chaisson served as a senior scientist and director of educational programs at Hubble’s “scientific nerve center,” the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Just below his original preface to his 1994 book The Hubble Wars is a note that reads like a legal disclaimer:

  No part of this book divulges sensitive military-intelligence material not previously having entered the public domain. I have been scrupulous about neither identifying reconnaissance assets unknown to the public nor disclosing the specific capabilities of any known yet classified project.32

  Right off the bat, the reader is alerted to the largely unspoken and unseen military aspects of this signal achievement of human ingenuity, an instrument that most people around the world know only as a gateway to the glories of the cosmos. But once Chaisson reveals the connections between the Hubble Space Telescope and a certain spy satellite in the top-secret KEYHOLE series, it becomes clear why he added his disclaimer. A couple of decades later he wouldn’t have needed to be quite so cautious, since that particular KEYHOLE was declassified in 2011 and put on view for one whole day at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

  When a military program is secret or top secret, mentioning its existence or its codename is verboten. “KEYHOLE,” according to a 1964 security memo, was the name given to “the product obtained from U.S. reconnaissance operations from satellites.”33 Capsules of exposed film dropped back to Earth were the main but not the only product; SIGINT (signals intelligence), based on the monitoring and interception of radar and electronic communications, was the other product. The name KEYHOLE is now also given to the overall camera system used by the reconnaissance satellites or, more generally, the satellites themselves. To add another layer of obfuscation, the early KEYHOLEs were part of the CORONA program, overseen by the CIA.

  The KEYHOLE that Chaisson obliquely referenced was, it may now be said openly, the jumbo, sixty-foot-long KH-9 HEXAGON. The National Reconnaissance Office—whose very existence was classified for thirty years, until 1992—launched twenty of them between 1971 and 1986. Repeatedly the KH-9 has been described as being either the size of or larger than a school bus. The same comment has often been made about the Hubble, although the Hubble is a little shorter and less massive than the KH-9. Even before its 2011 declassification, writers would comment every now and again that the KH-9 (a.k.a. Big Bird) looked like a twin of the Hubble.

  Not a coincidence. Both could fit equally well lengthwise into the now-retired space shuttle’s cargo bay or atop a heavy-lift, Titan-class rocket. Both were fitted with long, narrow solar arrays angled away from their bodies. The biggest differences between the two were that the Hubble focuses at infinity and takes prolonged exposures of extremely dim and distant objects, while the KH-9 focused mostly between one hundred and two hundred miles down on Earth’s surface and took quick exposures. When Hubble points at Earth (which it does only occasionally, to help calibrate the telescope’s cameras), it
registers only smudges and blurs because it cannot focus that closely. When the KH-9’s precision mapping camera and twin panoramic rotating cameras pointed at Earth (mostly at the Soviet Union), they registered features such as missile silos, shipyards, airfields, rocket test facilities, submarine bases, even an ICBM under construction, with a resolution of two feet and a horizontal range of more than four hundred miles. In addition, Hubble carries no fuel, whereas the KH-9 had plenty of fuel so that it could change course and make multiple passes over sites of interest.34

  Early in its post-launch life, Hubble exhibited a bad case of the jitters—bad enough that its capacity to do the long, steady exposures required by scientific research would be seriously undercut if a cure couldn’t be found (it was). Orbiting Earth once every ninety-six minutes, Hubble shuddered each time it entered or exited orbital night (total darkness) after spending forty-eight minutes in orbital day (blazing sunlight). Thirty times every Earth day, Hubble pitched, oscillated, and wobbled as unobstructed heat from the reappearing Sun increased the temperature in some parts of the telescope by more than a hundred degrees Celsius within ninety seconds. Then, as the Sun sank from view a mere forty-five minutes later, the telescope would cool rapidly. The result? Hubble couldn’t track a target for more than ten minutes at a stretch.